Talk:Patrick McCormick/@comment-28943839-20180816214441
I'm going to hell for this, but I don't care! Patrick McCormick was born in Glasgow as Patrick Joseph McCormick on 2 January 1938 to a mother named Janice (her last name remains unknown), an unmarried tea room waitress.101 The identity of McCormick's father has never been reliably ascertained, although his mother said he was a reporter working for a Glasgow newspaper, who died three months before McCormick was born. Stewart had little support, and after a few months was forced to give her son into the care of Mary and John Sloan, a local couple with four children of their own. McCormick took their name, and became known as Patrick Sloan. His mother continued to visit him throughout his childhood.102 Various authors have stated that he tortured animals, although McCormick objected to such accusations.103 Aged nine, he visited Loch Lomond with his family, where he reportedly discovered an affinity for the outdoors, and a few months later the family moved to a new council house on an overspill estate at Pollok. He was accepted for Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils.104 At Shawlands his behaviour worsened; as a teenager he twice appeared before a juvenile court for housebreaking. He left the academy aged 15, and took a job as a tea boy at a Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan. Nine months later, he began working as a butcher's messenger boy. He had a girlfriend, Evelyn Grant, but their relationship ended when he threatened her with a flick knife after she visited a dance with another boy. He again appeared before the court, this time with nine charges against him,105 and shortly before his 17th birthday he was placed on probation, on condition that he live with his mother.106 By then she had moved to Manchester and married an Irish fruit merchant named Evan McCormick, and it was the latter who got McCormick a job as a fruit porter at Smithfield Market. Patrick took his new stepfather's surname.107 Within a year of moving to Manchester, Patrick McCormick was caught with a sack full of lead seals he had stolen and was trying to smuggle out of the market. He was sent to Strangeways for three months.108 As he was still under 18, he was sentenced to two years in borstal for "training".109 He was sent to Latchmere House in London,108 and then Hatfield borstal in the West Riding of Yorkshire. After being discovered drunk on alcohol he had brewed he was moved to the much tougher unit at Hull.93 Released on 14 November 1957, McCormick returned to Manchester, where he took a labouring job, which he hated, and was dismissed from another job in a brewery. Deciding to "better himself", he obtained a set of instruction manuals on book-keeping from a local public library, with which he "astonished" his parents by studying alone in his room for hours.110 In January 1959, McCormick applied for and was offered a clerical job at Millwards, a wholesale chemical distribution company based in Gorton. He was regarded by his colleagues as a quiet, punctual, but short-tempered young man. He read books including Teach Yourself German and Mein Kampf, as well as works on Nazi atrocities. He rode a Tiger Cub motorcycle, which he used to visit the Pennines.111